Re: ls -l --no-total

[Felipe Kellermann]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 5:39am  +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

>    > Did I mention ls should have a --no-total option
>    > to remove those annoying
>    > total 1120
>    > without needing to pipe to a filter.
> 
>    Another possibility would be to output the `total' to stderr.
> 
> The horror, why do people come up with these silly ideas?  `total
> NNNNN' is not a error message, and doesn't belong on stderr.

I've seen other programs printing only informative messages to stderr.
And doing a find + fgrep I can even see coreutils programs doing so.

It obviously ins't possible to change so drasticaly the behavior of `ls' 
by simple printing `total' to stderr. But perhaps a switch to printing 
only informative messages to stderr could be fine and allow for provable 
future additions (e.g., recent `dd' informative messages) to do the same.


> Do it correctly, extend ls so that the user can modify the output like
> for stat.
> 
> I'm still horrified...

I know this behavior is standardized but IIRC I've already read about 
(old) implementations that printed the `total' to stderr. 

-- 
Felipe Kellermann